Night Gallery is pleased to announce Form and Feeling, a group exhibition that includes paintings made by Tony Bluestone, Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Tomashi Jackson, RJ Messineo, Marisa Takal, and Zoe Walsh and sculptures made by Sahar Khoury and Sarah Zapata, curated by Ashton Cooper.
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Marisa Takal, Epicenter, 2024
Marisa Takal, Epicenter, detail, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Sahar Khoury, Untitled (split window, yellowfins and blue mirror with four handles and black belts), 2021
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, God Hates Rainbows, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Tony Bluestone, Interiority Design, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
This exhibition is animated by an impossible question: How does feeling make its way into form?
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Tony Bluestone, Measure to Fit, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
How are the sensations, emotions, and valences of consciousness reflected in material? Can observers perceive the residue of that feeling? Can it be drawn out by a kind slow looking or ekphrasis or thick description? Or does it exist outside of language? And how might we describe and understand our own affective responses to paint on ground or woven fiber or shaped clay?
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Tomashi Jackson, Here To Love You, 2023
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Sarah Zapata, in times of mourning or social protest 2, 2021
Sarah Zapata, in times of mourning or social protest 2, 2021
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Educated, as I was, in theories that foregrounded the constructedness of human life, sociality, and artistic production, I came to see these questions as not just irrelevant, but embarrassing, passé, unintellectual, and associated with bad politics. Still, in meandering ways, I found myself continually moving back toward them, wanting to take them seriously, wondering how to talk about embodied feeling and phenomenological experience without being suffocated by the foundational myth of the expressive artistic genius.
RJ Messineo, Anagram, 2023
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Sarah Zapata, in time of mourning or social protest 3, 2022
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Sahar Khoury, Untitled (holder of Lynne Hershman Leeson's plexiglass and Sarah Braman's glass), 2019
Sahar Khoury, Untitled (holder of Lynne Hershman Leeson's plexiglass and Sarah Braman's glass), detail, 2019
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Zoe Walsh, Light answers only light before the breeze, 2023
Zoe Walsh, Light answers only light before the breeze, detail, 2023
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
RJ Messineo, Culottes, 2022
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Sahar Khoury, Untitled (falafel column), 2022
Could foregrounding artists’ and viewers’ affective relationships to materials and form change the kinds of stories we tell about contemporary art? In his “Notes of a Painter” from 1908, Henri Matisse wrote: “I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.” Keeping in mind the well-elaborated critiques of art historical modernism, what would it mean to take this claim seriously as a theorization of how art represents and elicits affect? What would it mean to “attend to psychology and materiality at the level of affect and texture” as Eve Sedgwick put it in the introduction to Touching Feeling nearly 100 years later?
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Mercurial Descent, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Sahar Khoury, Untitled, 2022
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Sarah Zapata, in times of mourning or social protest 1, 2022
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Tomashi Jackson, Under Color of Authority (Spelman Alumni on the Grass/ Mary O'Callaghan, LAPD Officer), 2024
Tomashi Jackson, Under Color of Authority (Spelman Alumni on the Grass/ Mary O'Callaghan, LAPD Officer), detail, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Marisa Takal, Throughout and with Power, 2024
What would it mean to hear artists talk about their feelings? What would it mean for observers to talk about theirs? Here is an invitation to move through the jumble of form and feeling.
—Ashton Cooper
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Tony Bluestone, Guston's Nightmare, 2024
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Marisa Takal, At the Door, Waiting Your Whole Life, 2023
Marisa Takal, At the Door, Waiting Your Whole Life, detail, 2023
Sarah Zapata, in times of mourning or social protest 4, 2022
Form and Feeling, installation view, 2024
Ashton Cooper is Associate Curator at Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA. A recent graduate of the Ph.D. program at the University of Southern California, Cooper was previously a curatorial assistant and Luce Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles. Prior to that, she worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Getty Research Institute. Cooper has also contributed writing to Artforum, ArtReview, Mousse, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA), among other publications.
Sahar Khoury
Untitled (split window, yellowfins and blue mirror with four handles and black belts), 2021
ceramic, architectural glass test pieces, leather belts, silicone
20 × 10 × 15 in (50.80 × 25.40 × 38.10 cm)
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance
God Hates Rainbows, 2024
Flashe, acrylic, sea salt
65 3/4 x 60 in (167 x 152.4 cm)
Tomashi Jackson
Here To Love You, 2023
acrylic on canvas, bed linen, white paper bags with pentelic marble dust paste, yule marble dust paste with brass grommets on a maple awning frame
75 x 111 x 10 in (190.5 x 281.9 x 25.4 cm)
RJ Messineo
Anagram, 2023
oil on panel and canvas with magnets
80 x 60 x 1 1/2 in (203.2 x 152.4 x 3.8 cm)
Sarah Zapata
in times of mourning or social protest 2, 2021
handwoven cloth sewn and stuffed on panel
24 x 28 x 19 in (61 x 71.1 x 48.3 cm)
Sarah Zapata
in times of mourning or social protest 4, 2022
handwoven cloth sewn and stuffed on panel
25 x 18 x 20 in (63.5 x 45.7 x 50.8 cm)
Sarah Zapata
in time of mourning or social protest 3, 2022
handwoven cloth sewn and stuffed on panel
25 x 18 x 20 in (63.5 x 45.7 x 50.8 cm)
Sarah Zapata
in times of mourning or social protest 1, 2022
handwoven cloth sewn and stuffed on panel
33 x 27 x 33 in (83.8 x 68.6 x 83.8 cm)
Tomashi Jackson
Under Color of Authority (Spelman Alumni on the Grass/ Mary O'Callaghan, LAPD Officer), 2024
acrylic, Los Angeles soil paste, paper bags, and wood on canvas, linen, and denim with brass hooks and grommets on a handcrafted wood awning structure
56 1/2 x 81 1/2 x 8 in (143.5 x 207 x 20.3 cm)
Sahar Khoury
Untitled (holder of Lynne Hershman Leeson's plexiglass and Sarah Braman's glass), 2019
glazed ceramic, plexiglas, glass, steel, leather, white glue
18 x 40 x 17 in (45.7 x 101.6 x 43.2 cm)
Sahar Khoury
Untitled, 2022
ceramic, powder coated steel, anchoring resin
15 × 15 × 8 in (38.10 × 38.10 × 20.32 cm)
Sahar Khoury
Untitled (falafel column), 2022
ceramic, bronze, powder coated steel
58 ¼ × 19 ¾ × 12 ¼ in (147.96 × 50.17 × 31.12 cm)
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance
Mercurial Descent, 2024
Flashe, acrylic, sea salt
65 1/2 x 57 1/2 in (166.4 x 146.1 cm)
Zoe Walsh
Light answers only light before the breeze, 2023
acrylic on canvas-wrapped panel
72 x 112 inches (182.9 x 284.5 cm)
Marisa Takal
At the Door, Waiting Your Whole Life, 2023
packing tape, paper, pencil, watercolor, acrylic, aluminum tape, metal, adhesive label on tea box
9 1/4 x 6 1/4 x 4 1/2 in (23.5 x 15.9 x 11.4 cm)